Can the US Support Two Wars? w/Col Doug Macgregor:
Showing posts with label Ukraine war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine war. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Colonel Douglas MacGregor: Worshipping Dead Horses
By Colonel Douglas MacGregor
The American Conservative, July 18, 2022: Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, ruled as the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. For those who are unaware, Caligula, the great grandson of Rome’s first emperor, the brilliant Augustus Caesar, squandered the enormous wealth of the Roman State, declared himself to be a god, appointed his favorite racehorse to serve in the Roman Senate, and according to some sources, considered deifying the animal.
Moon of Alabama:
Three Other Writers With Thoughts On Ukraine
The American Conservative, July 18, 2022: Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, ruled as the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41. For those who are unaware, Caligula, the great grandson of Rome’s first emperor, the brilliant Augustus Caesar, squandered the enormous wealth of the Roman State, declared himself to be a god, appointed his favorite racehorse to serve in the Roman Senate, and according to some sources, considered deifying the animal.
After a little less than four years in office, Caligula was removed. Rome’s citizens, as well as its legions, were spared the indignity of having to worship a dead horse. Americans and Europeans are not so lucky.
Determined to fight his proxy war with Russia to the finish, Biden is losing the fight in Ukraine and his favorite, deified horse, NATO, is on life support. The only things sinking faster than Biden’s approval ratings are the American and European economies.
Readers will recall that President Trump wanted to reduce European dependence on American military power—to make Europeans their own “first responders.” Biden reversed Trump’s policy and promised to reinvigorate NATO, in the words of French President Macron, the “the brain dead alliance.”
The problem for NATO is the economic hardship wrought by Biden’s sanctions against Moscow are threatening Europe with economic Armageddon. It’s bad enough when European bond and stock futures plunge and the euro dips below parity with the U.S. dollar, but when Paris, the city of light, shuts off its famous night lights to save energy, things are truly horrific.
Related:
Three Other Writers With Thoughts On Ukraine
Consortium News
The Intercept
FOREIGN FIGHTERS IN UKRAINE COULD BE A TIME BOMB FOR THEIR HOME COUNTRIESYasha Levine
Scott Ritter on HIMARS Ukraine War Update July 21/2022
Scott Ritter on POSEIDON - Ukraine War Update July 22/2022
How corrupt is Justin Trudeau's Friend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky?
Ukraine Grain Exports - Myths And Reality
Ukrainian soldiers begin to rebel due to heavy losses in the conflict
Scott Ritter on POSEIDON - Ukraine War Update July 22/2022
Ukrainian soldiers begin to rebel due to heavy losses in the conflict
US "Started" The Ukraine Crisis, China Says
Lavrov - Extended Range Weapons In Ukraine Will Lead To More Loss Of Its Land
US Signals (Urges) Ukraine It Can (to) Use HIMARS Against Russian Targets In Crimea
Joe Biden’s Secret War in Ukraine: American soldiers are already “boots on the ground”
China blames US for Ukraine conflict
Over 23,000 people evacuated from Ukraine, DPR, LPR to Russia in past day
Zelensky to consider replacing Catherine the Great statue with gay porn star monument in Odesa Which will absolutely insure the support of every witless, Western woke wimp for Zel's war on the Russian people and culture of Eastern Ukraine
If they do, Russia will hit back hard against Kyiv, then the Nazi-backing NATO countries, like Liberal Canada, will urge Zel to hit back harder, then before you know it, we have WW3. Yeah, the mission of the handlers of a senile US President accomplished -- whether Biden will understand that or not.
Friday, July 15, 2022
Jordan Peterson on Ukraine: A Slick Presentation of Simple-Minded Misconceptions and Imaginative Nonsense
Jordan Peterson, in pin-striped suit, waistcoat, and gray silk tie, so reminiscent of the style of Britain's 1960's Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, presents his view on the current Russo-Ukraine war in this slick video.
Colonel Douglas McGregor throwing weapons at Ukraine is useless - A ceasefire is desperately needed
Paul Craig Roberts: When We Are at War with Russia, What Will We be Fighting for?
WWIII Will be the Price for Supporting Ukraine's Donbas Land Grab
This Proxy War Has No Exit Strategy
The Annual Cost in American taxdollars to prop up Zelensky is more than Russia’s annual military budget
As one has come to expect of Peterson, the presentation is (a) immensely popular, with well over a million views on U-Tube in just four days, and the number still climbing rapidly, and (b) a mix of unreasonable judgements and imaginative ideas amounting to nonsense.
Thus, Peterson begins by describing "what Putin has done" in Ukraine as "unconscionable." But in fact, what Putin has done is simply what any Russian leader was bound to do if they were to avoid being removed from office and replaced by someone with a stronger stomach.
To understand why Putin had no choice, one must understand the circumstances leading to his "special military operation" in Ukraine. It was a direct response to the decision of the Kyiv government to dispatch a hundred thousand troops to Eastern Ukraine, an army including multiple overtly Nazi formations. This action by the, according to Western media, heroic Zelensky -- who now rules Ukraine as a dictator without parliamentary opposition -- had only one conceivable objective; namely, the conquest of the breakaway Donbas Republics that have been under constant Ukrainian shelling for eight years resulting in 13,000 civilian deaths.
Without Russian intervention, Putin was faced with the near certainty of a massacre of ethnic Russians who are characterized by Ukrainian Nazis as Orcs and cockroaches. And there is nothing fake about these Nazis. They are adherents of the ideology of Stepan Bandera, Ukraine's World War II nationalist leader whose followers aided Hitler's Nazis slaughter 30,000 Kyiv Jews, and who traversed the country burning villages and slaughtering hundreds of thousand of Ukrainian Poles. These massacres, Canadians might note, were promoted by Michail Chomiac, a Ukrainian newspaper editor and the grandfather of Justin Trudeau's deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland.
And if anyone doubts that the anti-Russian genocidal impulse lives on in Ukraine, they should not forget the tapped phone conversation in which former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Julia Tymoshenko not only said it was time to "grab guns and kill damn Russians" but urged that eight million Donbas Russians be nuked*.
In a further bizarre judgement, Peterson condemns the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, for supporting Putin's military operation in Ukraine. But the Russian Orthodox Church is effectively a part of the Russian state apparatus. Patriarch Kirill can no more survive as a critic of Russia at war than the Archbishop of Canterbury could have survived had he condemned Britain's fire bombing of German cities during World War II.
In addition, though it is but a minor point, Peterson confuses the Black Sea, or possibly the Sea of Azov, with the Caspian Sea when speaking of Ukraine's offshore oil reserves, notwithstanding that Ukraine more than five hundred kilometers from the the Caspian Sea.
What may seem interesting, at first sight, is Peterson's notion that the Russo-Ukrainian war is a culturally determined European civil war between a re-Christianized Russia and a woke West, the latter having, as it must seem to the Russians, gone insane.
But if momentarily diverting, the idea is obviously wrong. While the woke West is undoubtedly insane, the conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with culture. For Russia it is a purely defensive war against US imperialism, forced upon Russia by the genocidal actions of the Nazified Kyiv regime toward Ukraine's ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population. As Putin stated recently: "we have no interest in what Zelensky wants. The decisions are made in Washington."
The American objective upon which the US has invested more than $53 billion thus far, and on which other NATO states have invested billions more, is to weaken and then break Russia into a collection of corrupt stans ruled by the likes Poroshenko and Zelensky: states that can be readily looted by Western oligarchs, and occupied by NATO, which could then advance to the border of China, the real threat to American global hegemony.
But to grant him his due, Peterson has one thing right. Russia's attitude to foreign military bases in Ukraine is the exact counterpart to America's Monro Doctrine, which gives warning to the world that the United States will tolerate no foreign military bases in Latin America.
________
* And those hated Donbas Russians, the target of Zelensky's US-backed genocidal war, are not newcomers. Some are surely descendants of Russians who settled on the East bank of the Dnieper River in the seventeenth Century, a hundred and more years before the United States even existed.
Related:Tuesday, June 14, 2022
How Will the Ukraine War End?
Jens Stoltenberg, head of NATO, spoke earlier this month of the Ukraine war lasting years during which he presumably looked forward to having NATO's Ukrainian proxy test out all kinds of military stuff on Russians. But now, damn it, the stinking Ruskies are winning. What to do? Well, you'd better negotiate a peace deal and his territory while you can, Stoltenberg tells cokehead porn actor, Ze.
Trouble is, it takes two to make a deal and Russians, as the're winning this war, will have the major say as to how things turn out. For example, they may just propose a referendum across Eastern and Southern Ukraine, where the resources are and where the Russian speakers are in the great majority.
The choice? One imagines there'd be three options. (1) Rule by Kyiv, (2) Rule by Moscow, or (3) Independence. Who could object. It'd be democratic, just as all the simpletons in Canada flying the Ukrainian flag surely want.
As for the outcome? Option One, Rule by Kyiv, seems a non-starter. So whatever else happens? Ze will be seen to have trashed his own country, which will be reduced to a poor, land-locked rump, with a fractious multiracial society, most of which seems destined to be absorbed by Poland with some particularly non-Polish ethnic bits going to other adjoining states.
Related:
"It’s possible that there are still people in the State Department trying to push this thing all the way to the end, but if the head of NATO is saying it’s time to concede to Russia, the show is over and it’s just a matter of how long it is going to take for the gears to move."
The thing is, Ze better surrender now before Russia takes more territory, or worse, before the Ukraine Armed Forces revoit, or even worse, change sides.
Yep, hurry up Ze, go pay your respects to Putin before his guys take you away and deposit you in Moscow's Lublanka jail, pending a war crimes trial.
Sorta makes sense. UAF troops may be deciding en masse to give up, or worse, to change sides.
Friday, May 13, 2022
US Failure in Ukraine
NY Times Shifts Pro-War Narrative, Documents Failure of US in Ukraine
Anti-War.com May 13, 2022: The New York Times has a job to do – and it has done that job spectacularly well over the past few months. The Times is a leader, in the opinion of this writer, the leader in spelling out the US narrative on the war in Ukraine, a tale designed to keep up morale, give the war a high moral purpose and justify the untold billions pouring from the taxpayers’ pockets into Joe Biden’s proxy war on Russia. Day in and day out in page after page of word and picture it has been instructing one and all, including politicians and lower level opinion shapers, exactly what to think about the war in Ukraine.
So, when the Times says that things are not going well for the US and its man in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky, it is a man bites dog kind of story. It tells us that some truths have gone from uncomfortable to undeniable. Such was nature of the page one story on May 11, headlined "Russians Hold Much of the East, Setbacks Aside."
Even that anti-narrative headline softens the bitter truth. The first paragraph of the story fesses up more completely, stating, "Obscured in the daily fighting is the geographic reality that Russia has made gains on the ground." Not "holding" ground but "gaining" ground. Not exactly a morale booster.
The Times goes on, "The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that its forces in eastern Ukraine had advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Russian-speaking provinces where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s army for eight years.". Here it reminds us that the first shots in this war were not fired on February 24, as the narrative goes, but eight long years ago in the Donbas. It is a jolting reminder for those who base their support for the war on "who fired the first shot," that their "moral" view has a considerable blind spot.
The Times continues: "…. the Donbas seizure, combined with the Russian invasion’s early success in seizing parts of southern Ukraine adjoining the Crimean peninsula ….gives the Kremlin enormous leverage in any future negotiation to halt the conflict."
It goes on: "And the Russians enjoy the added advantage of naval dominance in the Black Sea, the only maritime route for Ukrainian trade, which they have paralyzed with an embargo that could eventually starve Ukraine economically and is already contributing to a global grain shortage." More bad news.
More, "Russia has all but achieved one of its primary objectives: seizing a land bridge connecting Russian territory to the Crimean peninsula." And, "The last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in this area, at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, has been whittled to a few hundred hungry troops now confined mostly to bunkers." Ouch!
Finally, turning its attention to the economy, the Times states: "The war has "put Ukraine’s economy under enormous stress, with the heavy devastation of infrastructure and production capacities," the bank said in an economic update. It estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of Ukrainian businesses have shut down, 10 percent of the population has fled the country and a further 15 percent is displaced internally." That is a grand total of 25% of the population displaced from their homes.
Related:
Zelenskyy Says He's Ready to Talk With Putin
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